From the moment Europeans arrived in North America, they were awestruck by a continent awash with birds—great flocks of wild pigeons, prairies teeming with grouse, woodlands alive with brilliantly plumed songbirds. In Of a Feather, Scott Weidensaul traces American birding to its colorful origins: the frontier ornithologists who collected eggs between skirmishes with Indians; the society matrons who organized the first effective conservation movement; and the luminaries with checkered pasts, such as Alexander Wilson (a convicted blackmailer) and the endlessly self-mythologizing John James Audubon. Weidensaul also surveys the explosive growth of modern birding that began in 1934, when an awkward schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson published A Field Guide to the Birds.
Today birding counts iPod-wearing teens and obsessive “listers” among its tens of millions of participants, making what was once an eccentric hobby into something so completely mainstream it’s now (almost) cool. Of a Feather celebrates birders and their passion in a spirited and compulsively readable popular history.
Amiran White
Scott Weidensaul is the author of many previous works of natural history, including Return to Wild America, The Ghost with Trembling Wings, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Living on the Wind, and Mountains of the Heart. He is a federally licensed bird bander and lives in the Pennsylvania Appalachians.
